Buttsweat Towel© season has begun

73F, 76%.  7:18 AP.  Felt cooler today and my pace hovered around 7:00-7:05 for the second half of the run yet still felt easy.  Finished up with 5 or 6 hill sprints.

We should have some cooler weather blowing in next week.  By cooler, I mean maybe 3-5 degrees lower in the morning and highs below 100.  So it's all relative, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.  May even see sub-70F once or twice if we're lucky - basically a blizzard.

77F, 78%, 8:42 AP.

73F, 92%.  7:31 AP.  Got some rain yesterday (finally) to cool things off but it brought some humidity to replace the heat.  Tempo run tomorrow - I am hoping the forecasted 68F low actually happens...that is going to feel amazing if it holds true.

72F, 89%.  7:36 AP.  Nice out, but another failed tempo.  I could tell during the warmup it wasn't going to work today.  I still tried - my intent was 6 easy, then 6 @ 6:40.  Well, it felt like I was sprinting already in the first tempo mile, and I gave up once my pace started to bleed into the 6:50s, soon into the 3rd mile; I had no will to fight through it today.  Not sure what the deal was - as good as I felt Sunday, it was the complete opposite today.  Seems like I either feel really good or really bad these days.

71F, 82%.  8:22 AP.  Did a recovery run down to the HS track and back to check the progress of construction.  They've done exactly nothing in the past week.  It's almost like my training doesn't even matter to them.  Looks like it will just have to be 1/2 mile repeats on the road tomorrow...

71F, 82%.  Solid 6 x 0.5 mile workout today.  Of course, no track, so I set the ol' garmin for 1/2 mile laps.  I did 90 second jog recoveries between repeats.  3.5 mile warmup, then:

3:02, 2:58, 3:01, 3:00, 2:57, 2:59.

Average was 2:59.5.  I was shooting for 3:01-3:02, my "CV pace," roughly 10k pace, so I did a little better than that.  Given some hills and the fact that it's mid-July, definitely a good solid pace.

Interestingly, my recovery paces were faster today than they usually are; I averaged just under 8:00 pace on the 90-second recoveries according to Garmin.  Not sure what to make of that yet - I don't pay attention to my watch when I do repeats (except to see when my 90 seconds are up), but maybe I am getting more comfortable at 5-10k paces and it's just not crushing me like it used to.

73F, 80%.  8:49 AP.  Mount Scott!  I went with my neighbor and his friend to run up Mt. Scott today.  It's only about a 20 min drive, and I'd been wanting to do it for awhile (yes there are some "mountains" here).  There's a paved road that goes all the way to the top, about 1000' of elevation gain over 2.5 miles or so (7.5% avg grade).  We were at a 10 min pace most of the way, but I broke off with about .7 to go and made a good push to the top at about an 8 min pace.  Then we all jogged back down, added a few more easy miles on flatter ground, and called it a day.

Today was supposed to be recovery, so I suppose I'll just skip the long run and run short and easy tomorrow.  No sense in doing 3 difficult days in a row.